Over the past few weeks, my agency has been asked to participate in two RFPs specific to paid search and also asked to be involved in a couple of industry overview/review exercises. In each case, I've noticed a disturbing trend--the correlation of paid search management to bid technology. Bid management is a key piece--but, in my opinion, it is not the linchpin to paid search success.

People who buy radiators online are unique. For one thing, they don't really research their purchases beforehand. When your radiator blows up, you know you need a new one--fast! As John Thys, president of Radiator.com says, it's a different market. And for this market, pay-per-call is just the right thing.

Brett Tabke, who spearheads the conference PubCon and the WebmasterWorld site, shares thoughts about the search space.

So what happened to Yahoo? Last week, the online giant announced slow ad sales; Wall Street responded by forcing Yahoo stock down 11.2 percent. There's been a flurry of speculation as to what went wrong. But pointing to any one problem misses a crucial underlying issue that's giving Yahoo trouble. Simply put, Yahoo's hurting because its publisher side refuses to learn from its search side.

The debate on the branding value of pay-per-click search ads may be over before it was ever properly resolved. Google has spoken, at least indirectly, in a couple of news items from the Googleplex....

This month's column focuses on the local search category. This is a segment of search enjoying strong growth, and there is lots going on.

The fact is, the whole world is becoming digitized and indexable. It's not a new trend, it's been making inroads for the last two and a half decades, but there seems to be a tipping point of convergence that's rapidly approaching.

In my last column, I discussed the features that make search marketing so powerful--Proactive Consumption, Mass Customization, Instant Point-of-Need Direction, and Dynamic Performance-Based Pricing. Then I pondered how we can incorporate these attributes into other advertising media. I believe it is the role of search providers and search firms to push the agenda here.

Online data storage isn't the sexiest of trends emerging in the search space, but it's one with more implications than I at first realized.

You know those ads you see on screens in airports, office building elevators, and on the occasional person? They're called out-of-home digital ads. And my prediction for them is that they'll be almost entirely auction-based by 2010.